While wandering around the contemporary art museum Kiasma, I stopped to watch a video installation that was part of an exhibition where a young woman sitting on a sofa was eating various processed food dinners and lacked the interest or emphatic energy to even say hello when answering the phone. Among other things, she though about writing something in her blog, yet couldn’t get further than “Hi,” before giving up.
Hard relate, I thought. Yet I decided I can do better than that. Hence this post.
Adventures in music
I went to the Odysseus Festival a week ago, which by their own words is an “event for adventurous music”. I was there last year too and thought it was a nice quirky summer music festival that wasn’t too crowded.
Actually, going there was a no-brainer for me when they announced early on that Circle will perform there. They were again great. The setlist was a familiar one, so I was onboard from the start. There was also a special guest at the end (Taigen Kawabe aka Ill Japonia) giving his own flourish to the mix and clearly loving the occasion.
Circle delivers again, will I ever get tired of them?
Other worth mentioning artists I saw during the first day of the festival were Josephine Foster with her unique folk singing style and Olimpia Splendid that had a drum machine and bass lines that heavily reminded me of early Sisters of Mercy singles.
The next day I mainly focused on Circle’s own Interventio event within the festival, which was basically a few fringe artists performing and some interesting short movies by some avant garde filmmaker John Smith.
While Piia Rinne and Aprapat concentrated in looping sounds on tape and not making any contact with the audience apart from acknowledging the applauds after their set was done, Ill Japonia focused on a more physical performance to get the crowd engaged to his club beats and passionate singing.
After the audience took some time to recalibrate to the energetic performance and dance beats, they got up from their chairs and gathered them aside to free up space for dancing. Taigen’s stage performance was a mix of butoh dancing and poses I’ve been used to see with visual kei artists.
Program for Circle – Interventio 4.
But that was pretty much it. Overall the festival was okay, but only thanks to Circle’s gig, without them the festival offerings would have been a bit thin to be honest. There was a feeling that this time around the organisers were struggling to muster a compelling line-up, though I have to remind myself I only saw barely a third of them, so I might have just missed a lot of gems.
Well, I decided to give them extra support them by buying a festival cap anyways. We need these culture enablers in Helsinki.